Monday, March 03, 2008

Speechless

I am having trouble articulating my feelings regarding this article, although the fact that I spent a good deal of time reading it with a dropped jaw should tell you something.

Want to know how I would prove that I was Jewish, if I had to?

My maternal great-great grandfather was shot dead by the Nazis coming out of synagogue in Poland. We know this because it's written down in Yiddish, in a history of the town in Poland where he was killed.

Ask me again if I'm Jewish, why don't you?

(The anger is directed at the state of Israel, not at the readers of the blog.)

13 comments:

Ahh, it seems that heard-learned lessons have been forgotten. What happened to the attitude of "We lost so many Jews in the 1940s that a Jew is a Jew, each one as precious as the last."

Oh, yeah. Sorry. Orthodoxy killed it when they decided us Reform Jews weren't good enough. So did the attitudes toward intermarriage. Frankly, I'm not sure it ever really existed outside of my mind and belief system. (although it should)

But you know what? A Jew is a Jew and each is as precious as the next.

hmmm, more f***w*** who refused to 'get' the difference between race and ethnicity, or more importantly, refuse to see that the latter is the only way to escape the politics of pain the former has created for so many for far too long.

That is really stupid. I don't know how I would prove that I'm Jewish (because technically, I'm not. My mom's not Jewish. My dad is, and it's supposedly passed on maternally) but you could probably prove it with DNA.

Jeez. We are right in the middle of our Holocaust unit (I teach 8th grade ELA) and this reminds me of how Germans had to prove they were German, how they had to go back and show that 8 generations of blood was "clean" of any jewish, slavic, gypsy, or afro-european "taint." And then, they would let the "Aryans" marry. How sad that these people are giving such similar treatment.

My cousin got caught by this. Turned out his grandmother's family had been converted by a fraudulent "rabbi" and he wasn't considered Jewish. He and his Israeli fiance hopped the border to Lebanon and got married there. Then the family took another two years and much money to be properly converted. *sigh*

I believe a religion should be something one believes in, not someting one is born into. How ridiculous to have to proof one's beliefs through bloodline, rather than through thought and action.After all, a baby is not Jewish, or Catholic, or Budhist, or anything until that child grows up and understands what God, prayer, sacrifice, and religion is. The sooner we stop linking religion and blood, the sooner a more peaceable world can perhaps come into being.